How can I get my protected files back?

September 16, 2006 11:08 AM

My motherboard died, and now I need to hook the harddrives up to another PC to get the data off. Problem: Some of it was in the "My Documents" folder, and I can't get to it without being logged on to an admin account. I have no way of doing that, since I can't boot from the old windows installation anymore.

Is there some trick or program that will let me into the protected files on my old account? They're clearly there, as everything else on the HD is, but it yells at me about privileges when I try to get to them. We're talking about XP here, if it matters.

posted by borkingchikapa to computers & internet (4 comments total)

This is one of many, many solutions: Get Knoppix, burn a LiveCD and copy your stuff to another disk.
posted by jedrek at 11:14 AM on September 16, 2006

you should be able to swap out the old PC boot hard drive and the new PC boot hard drive and boot from the old one.

Alternatively, if you're putting them in enclosures, if your new PC is relatively new, you can try booting from the USB drive.

Finally, if you still want to do what you want to do, try using Knoppix. Knoppix is a Linux Live CD that'll boot up on the new CD, and recognize the old old drives, and will let you browse them/copy them/ do whatever.

The only caveats: you'll have to boot from your CD-drive, (which is just a bios setting change) and Knoppix (at least, the last time I used it) doesn't like writing to NTFS formatted drives, so have a USB memory stick handy to save all your work to.
posted by unexpected at 11:18 AM on September 16, 2006

Not sure I've understood the question correctly, but if I have you may just need to take ownership of the folder.
posted by ed\26h at 11:32 AM on September 16, 2006

Yeah, taking ownership would work, unless the data is encrypted.
posted by insomnus at 4:13 PM on September 16, 2006